No wonder Hillary Clinton and her friends are losing the information war. They’ve been doing a marvellous job this month in turning the mainstream media into an Alice in Wonderland circus without the help of 'conspiracy theorists'.

The story on the killing of Osama bin Laden was dutifully reported right across the spectrum, including Channel 4 News, Al Jazeera and Russia Today. It is believed to be the ninth time that Osama bin Laden has died. Hitler and Goebbels knew that if you’re going to tell a lie you make it big. But what happens if that doesn’t work? If you can't eliminate the opposition, I suppose all you can do is to make the big lie even bigger, and bigger, and bigger, until the whole propaganda bubble either implodes in a wave of incredulity, or you start a war. To do that you enrage the population against some irrational monster who’s threatening the very survival of the people you’re trying to brainwash. In this case, though, they’ve just killed him off.

In his nine minute speech, that was all the detail he gave, other than that he himself had given the order, and that he and his team had spoken with their counterparts in Pakistan, who agreed that was a good and historic day for both their nations. The rest was a repetition of previous rhetoric. Some further details were given in a subsequent press briefing, but very few. They said they had received information from 'detainees', which led them to the 'compound' in Abbottabad in August 2010. When they saw the compound, a spokesman said, they were shocked at what they saw: It sat on a large plot of land, relatively secluded when it was built at the end of a narrow dirt road, had 12- to 18-foot walls topped with barbed wire, with internal walls sectioning off different portions of the compound, with two security gates, and the residents burned their rubbish rather than putting it out for collection as their neighbours did! Yeah, we've had complaints from neighbours on that score, too. Furthermore, the three-story building, had few windows facing the outside of the compound, and a terrace on the third floor had a seven-foot privacy wall. I suppose if you lived in a place like Pakistan you might think of taking that precaution. Apart from that, I remember seeing quite a lot of properties like that when I worked in Italy. Nearly all of them had noisy guard dogs barking at the gates!!! Further suspicious aspects of the 'compound' were that it was valued at $1M, that it had no telephone or Internet connection, and that the brothers who were said to occupy it had no explainable source of wealth. That was before they knew of a third family, whose size and makeup matched the bin Laden family members. In fact, they said, everything they saw "was perfectly consistent with what our experts expected bin Laden’s hideout to look like".

So why were they so shocked? They concluded that there was "a strong probability that that person was Osama bin Laden". On the basis of that they sent in their forces, meeting no resistance from local authorities, killing Osama bin Laden, three adult males and one female, who, they said, was being used as a shield by a male combatant. They detonated one of their own helicopters because of mechanical failure. The operation lasted under 40 minutes, and that was all the information the press was given in the briefing. In the subsequent question and answer session very little new information was given. One official denied that they had said that the helicopter failure had been mechanical. Apart from that, they said that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a firefight, and that they would ensure that his body would be handled in accordance with Islamic practice and tradition. They didn't know how long Osama bin Laden had been living at that compound. I would have expected any self-respecting journalist to be cautious over such a tale. There was lack of detail, evasion, and already hints of self-contradiction. There was also undue emphasis on the heroic role of the President. I should have thought that it might have occurred to some journalists that politicians sometimes don't tell the truth, or that in a war the first casualty is truth. Yet I couldn't find a single report in the mainstream media that questioned that Osama bin Laden had been in that 'compound' and had been killed by US forces, not even on Channel 4, Al Jazeera or Russia Today. Whatever the truth is, that is worrying.

Later he admitted: "And whether or not he got off any rounds, I quite frankly don’t know". But then he contradicted the previous statement that they didn't know how long Osama bin Laden had been living at the compound, firstly by insinuation. "We are looking right now at how he was able to hold out there for so long, and whether or not there was any type of support system within Pakistan that allowed him to stay there", he stated. Shortly afterwards he stated: "I think it’s inconceivable that bin Laden did not have a support system in the country that allowed him to remain there for an extended period of time". They were now insinuating that Pakistan may have had a hand in hiding Osama bin Laden, using a technique which I well recognise and needs a name. When it happens because of stupidity, people refer to it as 'a storm in a teacup'. The problem is that virtually no-one believes that it can be contrived by intelligent people, however obvious that is. War propaganda needs to be better understood.

In response to a question of whether they were watching the operation, John Brennan replied: "We were able to monitor the situation in real time and were able to have regular updates and to ensure that we had real-time visibility into the progress of the operation". He later mentioned "seeing that helicopter in a place and in a condition that it wasn’t supposed to be", so the information would presumably have been visual, but he avoided saying so directly. One journalist asked John Brennan: "Bin Laden used women as human shields when American personnel went in?", to which he replied, "There was family at that compound, and there was a female who was in fact in the line of fire that reportedly was used as a shield to shield bin Laden from the incoming fire". Journalists returned to this issue a couple of times later, for clarification. John Brennan stated that his understanding was that one of Osama bin Laden's wives served as a shield. On the question of releasing photos of bin Laden to show the world that he was dead, he said that they were doing everything they could to make sure that nobody had any basis to try to deny that they had got Osama bin Laden, but when pressed he was evasive. He talked at some length about the President personally having taken the decision, and about there having been disagreement, and what the downsides would have been if it hadn't been bin Laden. He stated that they were 99.9% certain that it was Osama bin Laden.

There was a further press briefing the following day by Press Secretary Jay Carney, in which various contradictions were revealed:

Jay Carney gave a new narrative, in which Osama bin Laden had not been armed and had not been shielded, but a wife had been shot in the leg in another room. Later, following further questioning, Jay Carney said, "Even I’m getting confused. In the room with bin Laden was bin Laden’s wife. She rushed one of the U.S. assaulters and was shot in the leg but not killed. A woman on the first floor was killed in the crossfire". He didn't know whether bin Laden's wife was armed. Eventually, he said, " Sorry. Mark, did you have -- let me go –". Another journalist asked, "In the narrative, which of those women was being used a human shield as Mr. Brennan suggested yesterday?", to which he invoked the "fog of war" – he didn't actually know. In answer to a question on how bin Laden resisted, he said that they had worked very hard to declassify information in record speed. On whether enhanced interrogation techniques had been employed he obfuscated.

The contradictions were reported in the mainstream media, as in The Guardian, which reported under the heading 'Osama bin Laden's final moments: America changes its story":

"We know he was there at least five years", President Obama stated. Shortly afterwards he said "But we know that for five to six years this compound was there, and our belief is that he was there during that time". That's not quite the same thing. He said that before they had done DNA testing on the body they were 95% certain that it was Osama bin Laden. "Did you see the pictures?", Obama was asked. "Yes", he replied. "What was your reaction when you saw them?" – "It was him". "Why haven't you released them?" – "You know, we discussed this internally. Keep in mind that we are absolutely certain this was him. We've done DNA sampling and testing. And so there is no doubt that we killed Osama bin Laden. It is important for us to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence. As a propaganda tool".

So on the basis of unpublished DNA evidence and the President's assessment of unseen photos, they are 100% sure it was him. It would be interesting to get some comments from DNA experts on this, as every national newspaper reporting this interview should have done. He was asked "There are people in Pakistan, for example, who say, 'Look, this is all a lie. This is another American trick. Osama's not dead', and he replied: "You know, the truth is that - and we're monitoring worldwide reaction -- there's no doubt that bin Laden is dead. Certainly there's no doubt among al Qaeda members that he is dead. And so we don't think that a photograph in and of itself is gonna make any difference. There are gonna be some folks who deny it. The fact of the matter is, you will not see bin Laden walkin' on this earth again". The fact of the matter, actually, is that no-one has seen bin Laden walkin' on this earth since December 2001. On Pakistan, Barack Obama said: "We think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan. But we don't know who or what that support network was. We don't know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, and that's something that we have to investigate, and more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate". We've now come a long way from not knowing how long Osama bin Laden had been in that 'compound'.

That half hour interview was spun out to an hour's programme on CBS news, in which the president's heroic role was hyped up, and the few facts available were developed into a dramatic narrative of how Osama bin Laden had been resident in Pakistan for at least five years, with possible duplicity in Pakistan in keeping his whereabouts quiet for that period (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20059739-503544.html).

The narrative is presented on the website in three video parts under the title 'Killing Bin Laden: The President's Story'. Part 3 shows the FBI web page for bin Laden, without pointing out that 9/11 was not mentioned on that page, and includes a clip from a video released during the weekend, purporting to show Osama bin Laden watching videos in his 'compound'.

The subsequent White House briefing was vacuous (Link). The presumed Pakistani complicity was hyped up further by one questioner, who said that Osama had been "living and protected by the Pakistani intelligence and military and living like a maharaja". Eventually, one questioner asked: "Can you clarify, has the President indicated to you in any way that he wants you to stop giving out any clarifications or information?" "No", replied Jay Carney. "Or that he wants DOD [the Department of Defense] to stop? Because you’re directing us in that spirit –", continued the questioner. Jay Carney replied that they had provided a great number of details, and that they didn't have any new details provide, shortly afterwards adding that the level of detail and the amount of information had been rather extraordinary. "So can’t we keep doing that?", asked the questioner. "Well, no", came the reply. The questioner tried pursuing details over the burial at sea: "There’s always a written naval record of a burial at sea. Could we have a copy?", he asked. Jay Carney agreed to ask the President, but added that there was no point in trying to tease out all these details on an operation that they had provided a great number of details on. Following up on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, the same questioner was told that they had multiple ways of gathering information, and different methods of getting information. I'm sure journalists present would have loved to know just what they were, for their own purposes. Although some sense of realism started to creep into the mainstream media, the whole thing was being sanitised. A gang of school kids having beaten someone up in the playground would have to do better than that in explaining their actions, otherwise their parents would be know about it very quickly. The whole thing depends on the projection of authority by arrogant people, and the submissiveness of the public.

The whole narrative provides a fascinating study of how creating of 'a storm in a teacup' can work, at any level. I first came across this in the committee I was in in 2005, when the Treasurer was fishing for some point of trivia that she could seed a quarrel on. She started off by complaining about the amount of paper I had used in photocopying minutes and accounts, when she herself had been in a position to provide years of reports on computer disc if she had wanted to be helpful. Eventually, she complained that she didn't like the tone of a question I had put, and on the basis of that created a narrative that turned me into the Osama bin Laden of the whole association. That's how quarrels are manufactured, and it's how wars begin. The big news in both cases should have been the fact that they were obfuscating, and that perhaps that could indicate that they were covering up for previous lies.

What I've attempted in this newsletter is to analyse the propaganda techniques employed. By this stage, virtually everyone other than the Western mainstream media seemed to be recognising that things weren't quite as they had appeared. I retrieved about 70 000 items when I googled "Osama bin Laden Is Dead Again" (in quotes). But we haven't finished yet. A good propagandist will dismiss the likely reactions with a preemptive strike, and that is exactly what happened. It was being put about by some journalists and bloggers that anyone who disbelieved what they were being told about the killing of Osama bin Laden was a 'conspiracy theorist'.

I cannot believe than any genuine Christian would write such stuff, especially not a former editor of the Catholic Herald. I asked in a comment, "How is not believing everything we are told by The Daily Telegraph conspiracy theory?" (Ian Fantom 05/02/2011 04:06 PM), and whether, if The Daily Telegraph had information that the FBI didn't have, did they have links with MI6 or the CIA. Someone replied "You'll have to ask Con Coughlin about that! : - / ", so I looked up Con Coughlin and found lots on reported links with MI6.

We now have a potential military conflict between two major nuclear powers, over the sovereignty of a third nuclear power, in an operation in a part of the world already involving three nuclear powers, and bordering on a further two. All this has arisen through military rhetoric, based on no publicly verifiable evidence, which remains largely unquestioned by a compliant Western press. By its belligerence, the US is clearly pushing Pakistan into the arms of China. President Zadari has held talks in China on a wide range of areas of cooperation. He said that language was the most potent instrument for promoting people to people contacts and called for elaborate institutional arrangements for teaching Chinese and Urdu languages to the students, workers and people of Pakistan and China.

Meanwhile, some of the British newspapers were carrying front-page headlines, screaming out that Osama bin Laden had been responsible not only for 9/11, but also for 7/7. The Sun put out a front page headline on May 4: 'BIN LADEN UNARMED – Just like his 9/11 and 7/7 victims'. I wrote a comment for their website: "The verdict of the 7/7 Inquest is not due until Friday. How can The Sun preempt that verdict with a statement on today's front page stating that Osama bin Laden was responsible? Is that not contempt of court?". On checking later I found that my comment was not there, and the headline had been changed.

I can understand The Sun upholding its normal standards of mendacity, but why should the Daily Mail put out such headings? This is the newspaper which has so consistently given prominence to stories pointing to possible state crimes. It was The Mail on Sunday, which first went public with the Shayler Affair. So if even The Daily Mail is screaming at us that Osama bin Laden was responsible for 7/7 when there is not a scrap of evidence that he was, we have to wonder what on earth is going on. They wrote a headline:

I wrote a comment for their web page, but a friend wrote in the Keep Talking group: "It wouldn't at all surprise me if the Daily Mail don't accept any comments for that article". I replied: "Interesting observation. They haven't disabled comments linked to the Daily Mail article, but 23 hours after my comment was submitted, it still hasn't appeared. There's just a note saying: 'No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards'.

I sent another comment, saying simply: "The verdict for the 7/7 inquest is not due out until tomorrow. I don't think you should be preempting it". That didn't appear either. Now it says simply that comments are closed, and there are none. These headlines came out days before the verdict was due out for the 7/7 inquest.

I was not aware of Osama bin Laden being even mentioned in the public hearings of the inquest. He was certainly not a feature in the inquest, and when the verdict was published there was not a single mention of Osama bin Laden. There were only two mentions of Al Qaeda, and they were only in passing. There was nothing in the verdict to incriminate either. So when a verdict can be preempted like that, one really has to wonder whose hand is behind the mainstream press.

The 7/7 inquest verdict of 'unlawful killing' came as no surprise to anyone, nor did the pronouncement of guilt on the 7/7 Four, since that was pronounced by the coroner before the hearings began. The verdict was announced on the same day as the results of the UK referendum on the voting system and local government elections, which grabbed most of the press attention. Newsnight was dedicated entirely to the voting, but they did have a Newsnight Special during the day. I saw part of that by chance, when Jeremy Paxman stated that he thought that they had to presume that the bombing hadn't been carried out by the state. He didn't say why they had to presume that, but I should imagine it has something to do with keeping his job.

There was discussion here in the comments section, and various people had been complaining about the moderator taking out legitimate comments. Eventually I found that I was being moderated out when I mentioned '7/7 Ripple Effect'. I had stated that I had previously seen a comment mentioning '7/7 Ripple Effect', but that I couldn't now find it. Instead, what appeared was: "This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn't abide by our community standards …".

Eventually, though, all trace of my comments was being deleted. As a test, I entered a comment with just the words "7/7 Ripple Effect", and that was deleted shortly afterwards. This is The Guardian, which has exposed the News of the World in phone hacking, and sponsored Nick Davies in the publication of Flat Earth News, a book which exposes all sorts of distortions in the mainstream media. There has to be some big reason why '7/7 Ripple Effect' cannot be mentioned. Eventually, the moderator, Guardian journalist Laura Oliver wrote: "As the live blog updates have finished this thread will keep going for a while longer - but will be closed to comments from 7pm (GMT)".

I replied: "It seems that as far as I am concerned you have closed this thread already. Is there a D-notice or a superinjunction on this topic?". That comment stayed.

I should have thought that was extremely sloppy judicial practice, if not unethical and cowardly. Many people would have known that the main 'conspiracy theory' at the time was the reconstruction presented in the video '7/7 Ripple Effect' by John Anthony Hill, under the pseudonym Muad'Dib. Any person criticised in a court of law should surely have the right to defend himself, and his claims should be subjected to critical analyis. This he could not do, because he had no representation in the inquest, mentions of his video were being censored by the mainstream media, and he himself was being held behind bars on a charge of attempting to pervert the course of justice.

Lady Justice Hallett should be suspended, pending a proper judicial inquiry into her conduct. I am delighted to report that Muad'Dib was acquitted on May 12, just six days after publication of the 7/7 inquest verdict.

I wasn't there myself; I was busy trying to draw attention to it in the mainstream media. Muad'Dib has shown a great deal of courage and composure during his lengthy ordeal, and should be congratulated for that. Had the authorities not arrested him and subjected him to such treatment, then there was little harm that he was likely to have done to them, since he was living quietly, and not seeking publicity as author of the video. His videos sent to the court would simply have been ignored. However, by making such a fuss over him, the authorities have themselves brought this issue to the attention of a lot of people, and brought themselves into disrepute.

May 2011 has been an incredible month. I would have had more than enough material without even mentioning Osama bin Laden or Muad'Dib, as story after story hit the headlines. But the end of the month is approaching, and I have to stop. Muad'Dib is now getting his life together again, and still in temporary residence in London, where we hope to meet him again shortly at our next Keep Talking meeting. I was amused by a piece that Al Jazeera put out, showing video clips of television announcers confusing 'Obama' with 'Osama'. I'm surprised no-one yet has talked of 'Obama sin Laden'.

We seem to have got ourselves embroiled in yet another war, leaving us trying to figure out just what happened when it’s too late to do anything about it. For a while, the world faced a dilemma of letting the people of Benghazi be slaughtered or let in NATO under a dark suspicion that their motive may not be humanitarian but oil. Was it really like that?

Analysts are working on it, but there were dire warnings in the UK Parliament against mission creep. It now seems that that is exactly what is happening. Surely, if the mission is to protect the population in an area, the remedy is not to send in the bombers, but to set up a UN protectorate and send in UN peace-keeping troops, under a mandate that allows them to do just that and nothing more.

The President of the Public Banking Institute, which campaigns for banking reform in the US, thinks that the motive may be to do with banking. Writing in Global Research, Ellen Brown reports on

It appears that the Central Bank of Libya is state owned, and that it has nearly 144 tons of gold. Retired US General Wesley Clark is reported to have said that after 9/11 there were plans to take out seven countries, including Iraq and Libya.

“What do these countries have in common?” asks Ellen Brown, “In the context of banking, one that sticks out is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements ... The most renegade of the lot could be Libya and Iraq”.

If wars are really manufactured for financial gain, then it makes sense to try to figure out how the rich and powerful operate, and that means looking fundamentally at the banking system.

I’ve been following the development of a group called Positive Money (http://www.positivemoney.org), which is campaigning in the UK for fundamental reform of the banking system.

I was expecting them to say that they had already studied such proposals before, but they didn’t. It was as if it was all new to them, too. I was interested to hear that the Governer of the Bank of England himself is sympathetic to reform. “Of all the ways of organising banking, the worst is the one we have today”, he is quoted as saying. Positive Money have opened up an office in London, and are, or have been, looking for volunteers to man it. They are engaged in research, education, and promotion of ideas on banking reform.

I went to a meeting in London on 5th April, which they were videoing for the purposes of producing a DVD. Ben Dyson explained the problems of the current banking system, and how it is open to abuse.

One statement that amazed me was that most of the mainstream economists, including many financial journalists, don’t understand how the fractional reserve system works. I suspect in many cases it’s just that they don’t want to.

In the subsequent discussion, I said that I had first had it explained to me by people I happened to meet in Trafalgar Square and Parliament Square on 9/11 truth demonstrations and Iraq war demonstrations. I had been amazed to hear that banks just create money out of thin air whenever a loan is made. They were telling me of the forthcoming economic crisis long before it actually happened. It would be contrived, they said, and that is how it appears to have been.

I recently saw the film ‘Inside Job’ about the financial corruption leading to the economic crisis:

Even the credit rating agencies seem to have been corrupted, which is very worrying, considering that the fete of Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and any other country with a vulnerable economy is largely determined by such agencies.

Positive Money are now asking people to write to their MPs, and one early MP to speak out is 9/11 truther Michael Meacher, who agrees with two reforms:():

It seems that banking reform, because of the high impact that the economic crisis is having on everyday life, is getting reasonable coverage in the mainstream media where other topics, such as what really happened in 9/11 and 7/7 remain taboo (although Mr Meacher did write the foreward to the revised edition of David Griffin's "The New Pearl Harbour"). It seems, though, that the government will be more concerned in appearing to do something than actually doing something.

Just after I had sent out my last newsletter I heard that Muad’Dib, the author of the ‘7/7 Ripple Effect’ video, had been released from Wandsworth prison on bail. This was a surprise, since the previous day he had been refused the right to attend his own bail hearing. So we invited him to an informal meeting of the London ‘9/11 Keep Talking’ group, which we held one afternoon because of a curfew being imposed. We heard how the prison authorities had been making excuses for not taking Muad’Dib to court, but eventually were forced to do so by the judge who “got serious” with them. It was also a good meeting from the point of view of exchanging information on 7/7, even though Muad’Dib had not been able to keep up with the inquest hearings from his prison cell.

His trial is set for 9 May, three days after the verdict of the 7/7 inquest is to be announced. I see that there are legal procedures for submitting information to a court of law under ‘amicus curiae’; you can’t just send the material to the court.

But to get a conviction, the prosecution would have to prove intent to pervert the course of justice, which is not proven merely by showing that the accused has not followed proper procedures. I should have thought that common sense would dictate that the court administrators would merely send a copy of the legal procedures to anyone approaching them. It’s not as if he had approached jurors individually. Muad’Dib told us that others had sent the DVDs to the court and had not been arrested, so clearly he was arrested because he was the author. I got a bit concerned at the meeting, when Muad’Dib said that he was going to challenge the jurisdiction of the court on a religious argument concerning the authenticity of the coronation stone. But then he assured us that if that failed, he would have proper legal representation in the court to defend him on the specific charge. The question of the coronation stone doesn’t mean much to me personally, since I don’t believe in divine rights of the monarchy anyway. I see state religion as being a pretext for power rather than an authority for power. But then, if they justify themselves on religious grounds, I suppose they should expect to be challenged on religious grounds. It seems to me that the court will reject Muad’Dib’s argument on the grounds that it is not in their interests to accept it.

The people who really matter in the power structure are the people who control the wealth of the nation. They are now generally believed to be the power behind the monarchy. They are also widely believed to be the people behind the current economic crisis and lots of other things.

Two days before Muad’Dib’s interview on Truth Jihad Radio, I was interviewed on the contents of my previous newsletter, in which I had reported Hillary Clinton’s statement that they, whoever they were, were losing the information war.

Essentially, if they are losing the information war, then we in the truth movement are winning it. But it’s not quite that simple, because here in the UK the truth movement seems to lurch from crisis to crisis, and the truthers seem to be plagued by various types of trolling by enigmatic people.

The phenomenon, together with the sense of discomfort they experience, is called ‘cognitive dissonance’, and it’s the same whether we’re talking about the collapse of Building 7 of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, or the financial chart of Esperanto Association of Britain, which shows the opposite of what members had been led to believe.

I went to the Annual General Meeting of Esperanto Association of Britain, which was held during the British Esperanto Congress in Eastbourne. I was a presidential candidate, standing on a platform of openness, though few would have known it because my election statement wasn’t published this year. They seem to get everything wrong all the time, then blame it on cock-up theory or play dumb.

Before going to Eastbourne, I sent an email round to the Keep Talking group to ask for their impressions of the description on the congress website. I got just one answer, which stated: “Language buffs should go for it if your web page gets an airing ... I’m not into languages at all though, so my judgement might be marred by a lack of awareness”. Exactly. You wouldn’t think that the Esperanto movement was meant to be a popular movement promoting an easy-to-learn second language for people who aren’t necessarily into languages. They’ve presented it as if it were some sort of deviant Klingon club with a pussy cat on the committee. Their congress theme of ‘Lumturoj, Lumuloj, Lumaĵoj’ wasn’t translated on the English-language page, and if it had been it wouldn’t have thrown much light on the matter. It means: ‘Light houses, luminants, illuminations’. If the topic had had anything to do with what the association existed for I might even have gone to the congress. When I was there for the AGM I told two people that I hadn’t joined the congress because no programme had been published. They both looked non-plussed. One of them was on the organising committee and insisted that you first join, then you get the programme. What’s happened to these people? They would have been amongst the first to insist on common sense until recently.

We had at that stage published quite a full programme, focusing on renewal of the Esperanto movement in Britain, yet the Esperanto association itself was putting out that we only had a ‘vague programme’ and that there was little on renewal in it, saying that at the end of January the organisation of the May congress seemed ‘still chaotic’. It was hypocritical negative propaganda undermining the concept of ‘renewal’, and was put out with the backing of the president. If you want a case study to see how brainwashing works, you couldn’t do better than to study the Esperanto movement in Britain. At the AGM the president did, to his credit, allow me to read out my 200 word election statement, but I had prepared a five-minute address as presidential candidate, which I was not allowed to present, because it was “not on the agenda”. No discussion on the candidates was allowed. That idea was introduced in 2002 when there were vigorous protests from members, but the then Director of Development, who chaired the meeting during the voting, insisted that he had strict instructions from the Management Committee. So this year I handed out copies of my election address to members as they were voting. It pointed out that two of the people they were just about to elect to the committee had been openly castigating the objectives of the Esperanto movement. One of them had written obsene stuff about not giving “two f**ks about harassing MPs into accepting Esperanto”, and the other had sabotaged proper discussion about furthering Esperanto in the Yahoo email group esper-brit. I had been trying to warn of negative things going on covertly in the Management Committee, but now they seem to be openly admitting it. This reminds me of the report by the think tank DEMOS, ‘The Power of Unreason’ which I reported on in my newsletters last year. They were essentially saying that the public are now so brainwashed that it is no longer necessary to infiltrate groups covertly when you can do it overtly. That’s exactly what seems to be happening. I had eventually managed to persuade the editor of the association’s newsletter to publish my financial chart, which had brought about the personal attacks and condemnations for ‘behaviour’ by the president, Professor John Wells, after I had delivered it to him in December 2005. It showed that, contrary to popular belief, the capital of the association had not been ‘eaten up’ before the sale of their property in 1999, but had been rising dramatically. I had expected to be ignored again, but this time I was delighted to receive a full page of invective, in which he stated that he would consider publishing an article including the chart if it wasn’t critical of the committee.

The new treasurer has added an agressive comment, saying that she was a professional accountant, and “as a trustee of the association, I of course have already studied and, to use Ian’s preferred expression, ‘researched’ the accounts of EAB”, adding that her professional opinion is that everything is in order and that there has been no fraud. I suppose a new treasurer would by the end of her first week, as a matter of course, have checked all the accounts of the association back to about the time she was in nappies. Yet no-one was suggesting that the accounts weren’t in order; I had merely compared them with what members were being led to believe at the time.

Yet the statistics from the Missing Persons Bureau give a 90% probability of a missing adult being alive, and a 64% probability of having preplanned his own disappearance, perhaps in order to take on a new identity. So why should the President want members to believe he is dead?

Also, he said, you would expect the police to be contacting virtually everyone who knew him. “Would that include me?”, I asked. “Definately”, he replied, “That’s their job”. I suppose from the police’s point of view it could be potentially an investigation of murder, abduction or concealment. Any decent investigation would quickly have revealed that David Kelso had been a top civil servant who took early retirement and then became heavily involved in a voluntary organisation, where he became involved in some sort of major dispute for five years before his disappearance. Of course they would have been contacting people.

This makes me think of the failure of Thames Valley Police to open a murder investigation into the death of Dr David Kelly, on which I have reported in previous newsletters.

I am particularly concerned because Thames Valley Police is the police force for my area. Several years ago I reported to my local police station the apparent theft of a thousand pounds from a charity based in Oxford; I had been following the story as editor of the now defunct news website ‘Esperanto Britain’. The administrator of the charity was reluctant to contact the police herself, but agreed to my doing it. I was amazed that as soon as I mentioned Esperanto they played dumb. So I tried the Oxford police station and they did the same. I had at that stage no thoughts of the possibility that there could be some sort of blacklist of taboo topics. It’s all fascinating stuff when you follow through how it works. And, of course, it can happen in any social movement that is promoting something that the Establishment doesn’t want to happen. It tells us how propaganda works at the microlevel, which is really important to understand if we want to preserve democracy at all levels. There must be something resiliant about Esperanto. “There must be something irresistable about it” said the Polish ambassador to the UK at the opening of Esperanto House in Barlaston in 2002. Indeed, it took over a century to do to the Esperanto movement what it took less than a decade to do to the 9/11 truth movement. The problems of the Esperanto movement and the 9/11 Truth Movement are essentially the same: most people want to believe what they are told by authority, however ridiculous it may be. A hundred years ago, when the Esperantists were complaining of ‘fraud and treachery’, there was no talk of ‘paranoia’ or ‘conspiracy theories’. I first became aware of ‘paranoia’ following the resignation of the president of the Universal Esperanto Association, Professor Ivo Lapenna, in 1974, when John Wells – yes the same John Wells – told me: “Lapenna is paranoid”. I was puzzled about that, but put it out of my mind until Autumn 2004, when I had asked John Wells for a chat, and he went into histrionics saying “You are childish and like Lapenna”. Then in December 2005, on seeing my financial chart, he said: “Ian is paranoid”. Now we all know what ‘paranoid’ means: it says more about the speaker than the accused. It seems that a whole set of psychological vocabulary has been brought into force since the end of the Second World War. Breaking that now seems to me to be of the highest priority in winning the information war. They seem to be succeeding in the US. Can we do that here in the UK?

"Al Jazeera is winning”, said Hillary Clinton, “The Chinese have opened up a global English language and multi-language television network, the Russians have opened up an English language network”.

In October last year, the chairman of the US Broadcasting Board of Governors stated that his organisation needs to fight its "enemies":

Yet overwhelmingly I notice that coverage of the US by Russia Today is coming not from Moscow, but from the truth movement and the alternative media in the US itself. On November 17 last year, Alex Jones told Max Keiser that as from about two years ago, people trust alternative media more than they trust mainstream media, and more people now get their news from alternative media than they do from old-line corporate media.

So if the US truth movement is making such headway in the US, why can’t we in the UK? As in the US, the UK 9/11 truth movement is a loose network of groups and individuals. At my very first meeting on December 13, 2006, David Shayler explained that it had not been set up as a single membership association because it would – not could – be infiltrated and dismantled. We did, however, have a national coordinating committee, which broke up in quarreling, and we used to have monthly meetings in London with over 50 people present, which now, it seems, is no longer possible. Wherever you look, it’s the same picture, and yet we struggle on.

The point of Western propaganda was summed up by the Labour Party’s late Richard Crossman: “The way to carry out good propaganda is never to appear to be carrying it out at all”.

A US National Security Council Directive in 1950 stated that the most effective kind of propaganda was the kind where “the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own”.

The Cultural Cold War was a secret programme of cultural propaganda in Western Europe, a central feature of which was to advance the claim that it did not exist. This was at a time when the British MI5 didn’t officially exist.

I think the reason that the 9/11 truth movement in the UK is kept under control, as well as some other movements I am familiar with, is simple: British propaganda is the best in the world.

Dr. Katherine Albrecht, talked about tracking individuals and the hugh databases that are being built up. “The fourth ammendent restricts the government’s ability to get into your personal information, but nothing restricts the ability of corporations to get into your personal information”, she stated. She said Stalin understood well how to identify people who were stepping out of the norm, and that in the US they are creating very similar things today. I wasn’t so sure about her claims on RFID, the so-called ‘spychips’. They are, after all, low-power radio frequency chips, which have antennas and can be jammed, or blocked with metal foil, but the overall trend is nevertheless worrying.

Alex Jones told Max Keiser in his interview on November 17 last year that his Infowars had been blocked by Google the previous week. So perhaps StartPage is good for finding black matter in cyberspace.

“What are you worrying about, Americans?”, she asked, “At least you have a constitution to shred. We don’t have that in Britain”. MI6 has become a state sponsor of terror, she told the audience, Britain is the CCTV capital of the world, 800 public bodies have power to eavesdrop on our communications, and now the police are acquiring military-style spy drones to be put into force in 2011 on the South Coast. On Fascism, she said it was all in place, and that we were “pretty well there”. We can’t rely on the judges and the courts to protect our basic rights, she said. She explained that some of the measures that were implemented supposedly to protect us from terrorism could have the opposite effect; we could find a situation when terrorists can build a bomb which goes off only when it identifies a US passport. She finished with: “At the rate we’re going we’re not going to have a democracy to fight for soon… Let’s go on and change the world”.

Will hope be enough? In London, the 7/7 inquest completed its public hearing of witnesses, and this was widely reported on various news channels in the UK. They focused on the human tragedy of the aftermath of the bombings rather than evidence of the cause. We were told that we will have to wait for the verdict. I thought the verdict had been declared by Judge Lady Justice Hallett right at the beginning: the 7/7 Four were guilty.

The general impression given is that the event was accompanied by a whole series of cockups, but the main point made by the coroner in the final session seems to have been concerned with linguistics:

Lawyers for families of those killed in the London 7/7 bombings are suggesting that MI5 is trying to gag justice by restricting the verdicts of the inquest into the attacks. I’d like to know what business it is of the Government or MI5. They did, after all, choose Lady Justice Hallett because they felt they needed a very senior judge to conduct the inquest, owing to the exceptional circumstances of the case. So why are they now trying to tell her her job?

March 7 saw another bail hearing for A J Hill, or Muad’Dip, the author of ‘7/7 Ripple Effect’. For the third time he was prevented by Wandworth Prison authorities from attending his own bail hearing. I was amazed that this could happen when I first heard about it from Nick, who had just visited John Hill in Wandsworth, after his second bail hearing. It is, however, all written up on John Hill’s trial website (http://mtrial.org/).

Apparently, the judge said that he would not grant him bail without him being in court. I tried to establish who his local MP would be, and found a piece in Hansard on prisoner voting rights (Hansard, House of Commons, 23 Nov 2010 : Column 152), in which Mark Pritchard MP asked the Secretary of State for Justice, Kenneth Clarke:

“I think there is some confusion in the House about the convention that applies, which both I and my hon. Friend should resolve-although it is not my responsibility to resolve it. I take the view that I represent my constituents when they are in prison wherever it is that they are imprisoned, but I know that other MPs take the view that they represent every resident of a prison in their constituency. Perhaps we should resolve the parliamentary conventions on this matter at the same time as we have a look at which prisoners might have voting rights.”

I therefore wrote to the MP for Wandsworth, in order to put the two in contact over the matter, but the MP’s personal assistant phoned me to say that he did not represent prisoners. What a mess! I was wondering whether John Hill would be released now that the public inquest hearings are over, or whether they will hold him until the end of the inquests into the deaths of the 7/7 Four.

The inquest’s website states: “The Coroner has jurisdiction over all 56 inquests which arise from the bombings on 7 July 2005. The Coroner has decided that the inquests into the deaths of the 52 members of the public killed on 7 July 2005 should be resumed and heard together. The inquests into the deaths of Mohammed Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Hasib Hussain and Jermaine Lindsay remain adjourned”.

I await the continuation of that inquest with interest. That inquest could be even more interesting than the current 7/7 inquest, in particular because of recent concern over the role of Mohammed Junaid Babar,

where a video is presented of the father of one of the victims, commenting on the implications. Graham Foulkes said that it looked as if the Americans may well have known in detail what Babar was up to in Pakistan, adding that that was a very, very serious matter:

“I'm really horrified and upset. It seems to me that the Americans were tacitly supporting a major international terrorist who set up and ran a training camp which Khan attended”, he explained.

Whether Khan was really a terrorist or just an actor in the 7/7 security exercises, it seems that the security services will have some very serious questions to answer if the inquest on the 7/7 Four goes ahead. Tony Blair tried to introduce detention without trial for up to 90 days. The Muad’Dib case demonstrates that we now have detention without trial for, so far, 150 days. The longer this goes on, the stronger becomes the case for a wide-ranging review of fundamental human rights in this country.

Then there are legal questions on statements of the guilt of the 7/7 Four to the potential jurors at the Kingston trial, and at the beginning of the inquest into the other 52 who died in the attacks. What happened to John Hill looks to me suspiciously like arbitrary arrest. That in itself should be causing deep concern. Then there is the issue of prisoner representation in Parliament. If they don’t have the vote, then no-one is interested in representing them. This makes a solid case for all prisoners having the vote, because even those who are critical of the powers-that-be have rights. If they can do this to John Hill, then they can do it to any of us.

There is another crazy aspect of this case, involving the right of free speech. According to the website, a condition of his bail in Ireland was that he “shall not communicate with any party in England or Wales save for wholly personal reasons or save for reasons wholly connected with the church and organisation known as The Way”.

This surely has to be an admission that his arrest was political. This should now be an issue to be raised with the Irish authorities and the EU authorities as a matter of human rights.

In the same report they show former US Secretary of State for Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, denying that $2.3 trillion had actually been lost in the defence budget, but claiming that it just couldn’t be tracked by the complex systems. He also denied any knowledge of Building 7:

All this bears out Annie Machon’s statement on Fascism, that we are “pretty well there”, and that we can’t rely on the judges and the courts to protect our basis rights. I used to wonder in my youth how many people around me at work would have been state aparachniks had we been in the Soviet Union rather than London. Now I am getting worried.

When Tony Blair told the House of Commons after 9/11 that those who carried out the 9/11 attacks were limited not by any sense of morality, and that their limits were only practical and technical (Hansard HoC 14 September 2001, vol 372), what would Tony Blair himself have been doing, had he been born in Libya and had not been limited rules of democracy?

Yet many in the UK who know about the deception of 9/11 and 7/7 react as if nothing had anything to do with them. It has everything to do with them, especially if they are young. If John Hill is correct in his reconstruction of 7/7, then we could be dealing with state murder, as, indeed, we could in the case of weapons expert Dr David Kelly, whose long overdue inquest must be about to be announced any time now. I was once in a discussion with a group of friends, in which one of them mentioned “the excesses of Stalin”. I would have been incredulous if I had known he would turn on me fifteen or so years later, but I thought that was odd at the time. “You mean it’s alright to kill a few people, but not millions?” I thought afterwards. You could almost write a headline: “State murder: not many dead”.

Whenever democracy is subverted, whether at the level of governments or tiny membership associations, it’s important to take a stand. Let’s have the courage to fight for our democracy now. If we don’t, will we have the courage to do it later?

Her fellow clowns said they felt “betrayed”. I know how they feel. Just over a year ago I had an article published under the heading ‘Klaŭnokratio’ [Clownocracy] in what I suppose is the Esperanto equivalent of Private Eye, in which I described various crazy goings on in London, where it seemed as if someone had sent in the clowns. That was to do both with Esperanto meetings and truth movement meetings, some of which I reported in my September 2009 newsletter, in connection with the book launch for ‘Terror on the Tube’.

On seeing that iconic image of the police clown, I realised that it would at least give me some credibility in what I had been trying to tell people who didn’t want to hear. Sure enough, the following morning I received an email from a long-lost Esperanto friend, who no longer thought I was crazy.

The Guardian report continued: “Today the acting commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Tim Godwin, said his force would take over the spy agency - the National Public Order Intelligence Unit - on Monday. It will come under the Met's counter-terrorism command”.

Erm, counterterrorism? Infiltrating legitimate demonstrations against the Iraq war is counterterrorism?

Such police undercover operations were not limited to anti-war protest groups. On January 10, a trial collapsed of six environmental protesters accused of conspiring to shut down the coal-fired Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottinghamshire in 2009, when one of those arrested, though not charged, turned out to be a police undercover agent.

The defence lawyer stated: “On Easter Monday 2009 over 400 police officers were involved in a raid on Iona School in Nottingham which led to 114 arrests. I represented 113 of those arrested. The 114th we now know was PC Kennedy, an undercover police officer. Six of my clients were due to face a long trial starting today. However the Prosecution told the defence just last Friday, just before the trial was due to begin, 20 months after the investigation had begun, that: ‘Previously unavailable material that significantly undermined the prosecution case came to light on Wednesday 5th January’. The discovery of this material came at a time when the prosecution were informed that we planned disclosure of the evidence relating to PC Kennedy before the trial judge”.

In other words, it looks like a very expensive police setup. He also said

The BBC’s Newsnight programme gave a feel of what it was like for fellow environmental campaigners on finding how they have been betrayed. They also interviewed an environmental protestor and a former undercover police officer, who spoke of “fractured lives”, and said that there are also people in the private security sector involved in undercover operations. The environmental campaigner said “The police police politically”. “There’s all sorts of political policing happening here in the UK, and it’s really damaging and it undermines democracy”, she said.

It turned out that PC Mark Kennedy was present also at the G20 demonstration in London when bystander Ian Tomlinson died, having been assaulted by a police officer:

In 2008, MP George Galloway accused London Metropolitan Police of engaging in "a deliberate conspiracy to bring about scenes of violent disorder" during President Bush's visit to the UK, naming a senior police officer thought to have been operating as an undercover agent provocateur", writing:

“Acpo set up the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU). This first focused primarily on animal rights activists, but mission creep rapidly set in and the unit's role expanded into peaceful protest groups. When this unaccountable, Stasi-like unit was revealed it rightly caused an outcry, especially as the term ‘domestic extremist’ is not recognised under UK law, and cannot legally be used as justification to aggressively invade an individual's privacy because of their legitimate political beliefs and activism.”

On the secret services she writes:

“Also, MI5 and MI6 operate outside any realistic democratic oversight and control. . . . The spooks are effectively above the law, while at the same time protected by the draconian Official Secrets Act”.

She replied to her own headline question with: “A group of well-meaning environmental protesters should not even be on the radar”.

We saw in my recent newsletters how the term ‘extremism’ was being used by the clowns of DEMOS to justify government infiltration into groups which questioned the government’s version of events. They were recommending ‘open infiltration’, suggesting that it wasn’t even necessary to do these things covertly any more.

Annie Machon’s reference to “the draconian Official Secrets Act” makes me think of an interesting blog that I came across the other day on the website of the Butler Esperanto Library. It goes under the title “el la senato de Liliputo” [From the senate of Liliput] and is about what the libarian overheard during a meeting of the Management Committee of the Esperanto Association in July 2005, which was being held in the next room. It was about a resolution which I was later to refer to as the “Esperanto Official Secrets Act”, under which any member of the committee who revealed anything about the discussions other than minuted decisions could be denounced to the members and to the Charity Commission. It makes fascinating reading, if you can read the language, especially when the Vice-President asks where the Librarian got the information from, and then himself suffers from selective amnesia.

The clownocratic wording of that resolution could only have been produced by a high-level civil servant, though the person in question just gave me a blank stare when I asked who wrote it. Yes, I was at the meeting, and the resolution was brought in just after I had started my research.

Tony Blair seemed to me to be having some difficulty in reconciling what he had been telling President Bush and the House of Commons with the legal advice that he had been given. The day before going to see President Bush, he was sent a letter by Lord Goldsmith, saying,

"I remain of the view that the correct legal interpretation of Resolution 1441 is that it does not authorise the use of military force without a further determination by the Security Council."

Having received that advice, what he actually told the President was that he repeated his strong commitment to do what it took to disarm Saddam. “Did you not feel constrained in making that commitment by the advice that the Attorney General was continuing to give you?”, asked Sir Roderic Lyne. Tony Blair explained that he didn’t.

Earlier (15 January, 2003) Tony Blair had told the Commons:

“There are circumstances in which a UN resolution is not necessary, because it is necessary to be able to say in circumstances where an unreasonable veto is put down that we would still act." Lord Goldsmith has stated said that these words were not compatible with the advice that he had given to him the day before.

Tony Blair explained: “…I was saying it not in a sense as a lawyer, but politically”. Yet Tony Blair’s case for invading Iraq was shifting more and more towards 9/11, and indeed there had been talk in the aftermath of 9/11 of a possible invasion of Iraq. If that was the case, then Tony Blair should again be recalled, to explain the sequence of events which led from 9/11 to the invasion of Iraq.

Chilcot should go back to the statements made to the House of Commons on the two recalls of Parliament following 9/11, and in television interviews around that time. Tony Blair was claiming that he had seen “incontrovertible evidence” that Osama bin Laden had been responsible for 9/11. As with the claimed evidence for weapons of mass destruction, the Chilcot commission should now be examining whether such “incontrovertible evidence” existed. Who else saw such “incontrovertivble evidence”?

The leaders of the other main political parties should be interviewed by Chilcot, because it was said that that “incontrovertible evidence” had been shown to them. The leader of the Conservative Party confirmed in the House of Commons that he had seen such incontrovertible evidence, but the leader of the Liberal Democrat Party did not. Had they, or had they not? And what about NATO? Had Lord Robertson, as Secretary General of NATO seen such incontrovertible evidence, and could his involvement in the New Labour Group have possibly coloured his judgement? If such incontrovertible evidence existed, but still has to be kept secret, then Chilcot should enquire on what grounds it would need to be kept secret a decade after the event.

Then what was the role of British ambassadors abroad? Former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, informs us that the UK ambassador in Moscow “was active in trying to mitigate Russian opposition to the War”. “He personally outlined to the Russian foreign minister the lies on Iraqi WMD. There was never the slightest private indication that Lyne had any misgivings about the war”, Craig Murray added. Perhaps Sir Roderic Lyne should be questioned by the Chilcot Commission.

But there might just be a slight problem with that: he may first have to clone himself, since he himself sits on the commission.

It seems Tony Blair missed a trick or two there. He could have personally taken charge of the whole inquiry, to ensure that the whole matter was in a safe pair of hands.

Perhaps also diplomatic contacts with Iraq around that time should be investigated. According to a new book by former CIA asset Susan Lindauer, Iraq offered to help the US in its investigation of 9/11. “He [Saddam] was more harsh on terrorists than we were”, she told Kevin Barret on No Lies Radio, “They were offering us everything we wanted”.

The story needs to be checked out, but if true, Tony Blair definitely needs to be recalled by Chilcot.

During Tony Blair’s session with Chilcot, the nation’s attention was deflected by the resignation of the Prime Minister’s director of communications, Andy Coulson, over the phone hacking allegations from the time that he was editor of the News of the World.

It appears that the London Metropolitan Police had been turning a blind eye to much of this, and there have been suggestions of possible collusion.

Even discussion of sensitive issues such as these can be difficult, which is the reason I produce these newsletters.

At last year’s Euston seminar on 9/11 Professor Jim Fetzer spoke about the difficulties in even arranging such a meeting. Videos of the talks have been posted on the Internet by Pentos Films (http://vimeo.com/user4693310/videos), together with interesting interviews with Ken O’Keefe, who chaired the meeting, and who had been abord the Mavi Mara relief boat to Gaza.

We used to have regular monthly meetings in London of that size, but no longer. To understand what happened, one should study how the clownocratic system works.

I have to say that this is perfectly normal. I have taken part in a fair number of discussion groups and forums on things that the Establishment may wish us to keep quiet on, and every single one of them has run into similar problems.

John Hill has been silenced over 7/7, at least for the duration of the inquest, on what appears to be a bogus charge. He is still languishing in Wandsworth Prison in London, protesting the innocence of the four Muslim lads who were declared guilty at the beginning of the inquest. The Friends of Muad’Dib are now asking people to distribute The Ripple Effect as widely as possible. Despite everything, people still say that they prefer to live in this country than anywhere else. Well let’s keep it that way. The rights we have were hard fought-over by our forefathers, not by us.

What are we going to hand over to the next generation? A problem with globalisation is that financial oligarchies from various parts of the world are coming together, sometimes in competition and sometimes in co-operation, and pulling the strings in governments across the world. Who has been pulling the strings in Egypt for thirty years? Perhaps it’s the same people that have been pulling the strings in Britain and other countries.

Who runs Russia? I recently saw an interview with President Karzai of Afghanistan on Russia Today during his visit to Moscow:

He came across much more sympathetically than he does in the West. Yet whichever propaganda image is nearer the truth, he does have a credible point that Afghan farmers turn to poppies out of desperation, and there’s a market in the West where the opium is processed. I should have thought that the way to solve that would have been for the occupying powers to subsidise Afghan farmers in producing real crops for the Afghan people – unless, of course they are under the control of clownocrats whose strings are being pulled by the oligarchs of the narcotics industry.

The Great Game continues. At least in an autocracy you know what the rules are: you either shut up or you have a revolution. But how do you deal with a clownocracy? I suppose you just have to laugh and keep talking.

For the first time ever in the history of the 9/11 truth movement, as far as I am aware, truth seekers will have an opportunity to be directly confronted by ‘the other side’.

The think-tank DEMOS has accepted an invitation to talk about their recommendations to Government on ‘open infiltration’ in what they call ‘conspiracy theory’ groups. That meeting will take place this coming Monday, under the heading ‘DEMOS v. The Truth Movement’.

Jamie Bartlett and Carl Miller have agreed to come along and explain the thinking behind their work, and to answer questions from the audience. In my September newsletter I described the recommendations, and gave some background on DEMOS, explaining its importance in Government thinking since 1997. If you don’t have that newsletter, and would like a copy, just email. I can also supply you with my Powerpoint presentation which I used at last month’s meeting of ‘9/11 Keep Talking’, in which I analysed the contents of the report.

In summary, I wrote in the newsletter:

“The report was headed, ‘the power of unreason: conspiracy theories, extremism and counter-terrorism’, and it claims to examine the role of conspiracy theories in extremist groups, arguing that conspiracy theories are linked to violence. It singles out the 9/11 Truth movement as being “most notorious and influential”, in that it questions the official accounts of 9/11.

It states that the obvious response by Government of producing information often fails because any refutation risks being taken as evidence of a cover up. The authors propose introducing ‘alternative information’ to civilian groups which believe in conspiracy theories. This may be introduced directly by agents of the Government, ‘or their allies’, in what they term ‘open infiltration’, or it may be introduced by civilian groups, which would be seen to be independent of Government.”

In response to one contributer, he stated: “Paolo you are absolutely right, the report was not about the 9/11 truth movement, but about conspiracy theories in extremist groups. I have, however, consequently been sucked into a debate about 9/11, which I am more than happy to take on”.

He added: “Finally, I will be going on to a radio show soon with someone who I think is quite an influential person in the 9/11 truth movement. To his credit he's willing to have me on his radio show. So I'll post details when I get them. I put a couple of questions up myself, and these were replied to privately. I then asked Carl whether they would be willing to come and talk to us and answer questions on their report. Carl replied that he would, but that they would both be abroad for the next meeting.

Some time later I wrote on Jamie’s blog page: “You and Carl will be most welcome to come to our 9/11 Keep Talking group in London to explain your report and to answer questions on it. This would provide an opportunity for both of you to demonstrate just how 'open infiltration' would work, and how you would propose to introduce ‘alternative information’ in connection with the 9/11 issue. It would also allow you to explain to us the other forms of infiltration which you propose, and why they are necessary, compared with the current methods already employed by the security services. Carl has already accepted in principle, and so if you could email me with some dates, I'll be able to set something up.”

Jamie responded privately, and that led to Monday’s meeting. Initially, we had intended this as a normal monthly meeting of the London group, which we had been holding in a pub in St Pancras Station, in a meeting room provided free of charge. But by the last meeting they were asking us to commit to £10 per head in drinks and food. Attendance went down. Then David Rose stepped in. He is a PhD student of Sociology at Goldsmith’s College, a part of the University of London, working on ‘Visual Sociology and Conspiracy Theories’ (http://www.gold.ac.uk/sociology/staff/nash/).

Both the DEMOS press release and the Guardian blog give prominance to 9/11, thus emphasising that the 9/11 truth movement was indeed of primary relevance to the report. Please feel free to pass this newsletter on to friends and to get the information out there, and above all, keep talking.

The Maiwand Lion

This statue, made of cast iron and weighing 16 tons, is situated in the town of Reading, Berkshire. The inscription reads:

This monument records the names and commemorates the valour and devotion of XI (11) officers and CCCXVIII (318) non-commissioned officers and men of the LXVI (66th) Berkshire Regiment who gave their lives for their country at Girishk Maiwand and Kandahar and during the Afghan Campaign MDCCCLXXIX (1879) - MDCCCLXXX (1880).

"History does not afford any grander or finer instance of gallantry and devotion to Queen and country than that displayed by the LXVI Regiment at the Battle of Maiwand on the XXVII (27th) July MDCCCLXXX (1880)."

Despatch of General Primrose.

Welcome!

This blog has been set up to publish regular newsletters in conjunction with the Berkshire 9/11 Truth website. The newsletters are on current issues as well as offering opinions on media articles both in the UK and abroad.